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This is a report about the Parental Rights in Prison Project (PRiP) based in Wales and England aimed at supporting incarcerated parents who wished to sustain their relationship with their children who are in the care of the local authority, care of family and significant others or adopted and to provide them with legal advice and support around their rights as parents.
Understanding reunification practice in the children’s social care system in England
This report aims to shed light on:
- what guides reunification practice
- how decisions are made before and after reunification
- what support for reunification looks like
- how reunification practice is monitored and improved.
Eurochild has published two new pieces of analysis to support efforts by the EU and the Ukrainian government to ensure the care of children arriving from Ukraine unaccompanied, separated from their families or who are placed in alternative care.
Building on Eurochild’s DataCare project with UNICEF ECARO, Eurochild is supporting UNICEF’s emergency response work to the invasion of Ukraine to support coordination efforts with the Ukrainian Ministry of Social Policy, the EU and Member…
Abstract
Growing numbers of grandparent special guardians (GSGs) are assuming responsibility for increasing numbers of children in the care system in England. Special guardianship arrangements are increasingly used as a permanency option as they allow children to remain in their kinship networks rather than in local authority care or be adopted; yet there is a scarcity of research on GSG carers' experiences. This paper reports a small qualitative research study where 10 sets of grandparents were interviewed to explore their journey to becoming GSGs and to theorize their subsequent…
Abstract
We aimed to evaluate a screening programme for infection in unaccompanied asylum seeking children and young people against national guidance and to describe the rates of identified infection in the cohort. The audit was conducted by retrospective case note review of routinely collected, anonymised patient data from all UASC referred between January 2016 and December 2018 in two paediatric infectious diseases clinics.There were 252 individuals from 19 countries included in the study, of these 88% were male, and the median age was 17 years (range 11–18). Individuals from…
Abstract
Purpose
Special guardianship order (SGO) assessments require social workers to make plans and recommendations for ongoing post-SGO contact between the child and the parents. However, there is very little policy to inform and guide practitioners on how these duties should be undertaken, and no studies that describe current practice. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the recommending of contact in special guardianship cases is currently working, by holding focus groups with social workers and special guardians. This paper reports on the results of a study to examine…
In 2017 more than 2,000 unaccompanied children sought asylum in the UK. This article summarises the policy and research literature on the mental health needs and experiences of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (UASC) in the UK, with the aim of suggesting how to enhance practice and improve outcomes for this vulnerable group. UASC have significant mental health needs with high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety; the asylum process greatly affects their well-being.
Higher levels of distress in older adolescents who are seeking asylum suggests that lower…
Abstract
Purpose
An integral feature of Special Guardianship Orders (SGO) is that the children should have some contact with their parents after the order is granted. Local authority social workers have a duty to plan and recommend levels and types of contact. But there is no policy guidance provided on how to undertake these duties, and little is known about the process that practitioners undertake. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the recommending of contact in special guardianship cases, and to provide data on what contact social workers are recommending the factors they…
Overview
A Special Guardianship Order (SGO) gives one or more individuals, usually family members, parental responsibility for a child who cannot live with their birth parents. Although the making of an SGO enables the person who holds the Order to exercise that responsibility ‘to the exclusion of all others’, the basic legal link between the child and their birth parents is preserved.
In the development of the policy framework for SGOs, there was a strong focus on people who were already caring for children – family members or foster carers in particular. However, they are now most…
Every child should be able to live safely with their loved ones, but conflict, human rights abuses and persecution can leave many with no other option than to flee their homes and leave their families behind. For the few who find a place of safety in the UK, callous and unfair rules are condemning them to a life without their closest family members.
In this report, Amnesty International UK, the Refugee Council and Save the Children expose how the UK Government’s policy on refugee family reunion is damaging the lives of children in the UK, and how its justifications for the policy are…